Amazing Blog byNilanjana Roy on the young woman who died following a brutal rape in Delhi:

That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper.

Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand. The Mathura rape case. The Vishaka guidelines. The Bhanwari Devi case, the Suryanelli affair, the Soni Sori allegations, the business at Kunan Pushpora. Each of these, the names of women and places, mapping a geography of pain; unspeakable damage inflicted on women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, if you want, create a constantly updating map of violence against women. Read more here

I don’t usually write about the environment, but an idea that professor Klaus Lackner of Columbia University advocating building billions of artificial trees to capture the build up of carbon in the atmosphere is difficult to ignore.

Biopact (a pact between Africa and Europe to develop green energy) writes that “carbon capture, in the form of “artificial trees”, is one idea explored in the BBC Two documentary Five Ways To Save The World. But could these extraordinary biomimetic machines help to mitigate our excessive burning of fossil fuels and its potentially catastrophic consequence, global warming? Or would we be better off using real trees in a carbon negative energy system? Let us compare the two ideas.

In 2006, more than 29 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. And 80% of the world’s energy supply still relies on fossil fuels. German geo-physicist professor Klaus Lackner of Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, thinks he may have found a way of tackling our current excessive use of fossil fuels.

I came across this excellent article by Issam Ahmed in the Guardian Unlimited on Pakistan’s Women Cricketers and was mesmerised.

“In last summer’s Bollywood blockbuster, Chak De! India (loosely translated as ‘Come on ! India’), screen icon Shahrukh Khan is charged with coaching a group of talented women hockey players, who, blighted by politics and written off by the media, have never achieved much. In a heart-warming tale based on the actual team’s historic gold medal at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Khan eventually succeeds in uniting his players into an all-conquering outfit, who ultimately sweep aside the mighty Aussies to win the World Cup.

Across the border in Pakistan, where, despite long-time political enmity, Bollywood flicks have long held the No1 spot in the cultural stakes, no such fairytale ending beckons for Pakistan’s current women’s hockey team, nor indeed for women playing the country’s most popular sport: cricket”. For full article click here